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Well… as legal as possible.
First off: what did I know about Lou?
Now that he was in control of the club, he was going to get the Midnight Riders back into drugs, gun running, and prostitution, just like the old days. No question about it.
To do that, he would need the cops to look the other way. That would require Chief of Police Dan Peters’s continued support – which wouldn’t be difficult. The corrupt asshole was already in Lou’s pocket. Those cops who hand-delivered Fiona and Kade to the Roadhouse the other night? They would have never done something that fucked up without explicit orders from the top.
And it would only get easier for Lou to buy the cops from here on out. In a couple of months, a lot of extra money would start pouring in from his illegal activities, and Lou could afford to stuff Dan’s pockets to overflowing.
BUT.
If there was one thing Dan Peters wanted more than money, it was to stay in power. Without his position as Chief of Police, Lou wouldn’t need him, and there would be no reason for the goose to lay any golden eggs for Dan anymore.
The one thing that could get Dan booted was a big enough public outcry. Technically he served at the pleasure of the mayor and the city council, who were all scared of Lou. But if something big enough happened, the mayor and the council would gladly turn Dan into a scapegoat.
And something big was coming.
One week ago exactly, Lou had killed two Santa Muertes during the armed robbery at the Seven Veils. The Santa Muertes hadn’t hit back yet, but it was a matter of when, not if.
Not only that, but any new illegal activities by Lou would require the club to encroach on Santa Muerte territory. Outside of LA and San Diego, they handled almost all of the meth, coke, and heroin in Southern California. Stepping on their toes would ignite an even bigger explosion than offing the two robbers. It’s one thing to shoot a couple of guys who come into your place of business with shotguns. It’s quite another to start fucking with a drug cartel’s money supply.
If the shit hit the fan between the Midnight Riders and the Santa Muertes, then Dan had a very good chance of getting covered in shit. All it would take was a couple of civilian deaths, which were practically a given. The Santa Muertes were famous for not giving a fuck who got caught in their crossfire.
That worried the hell out of me, knowing that some teenage boy out there was going to catch a bullet on a sidewalk, or some five-year-old girl was going to die playing in her backyard, all because of a bunch of fucked-up bikers. But there was nothing I could do, other than try to take Lou down and make peace with the Muertes before the shooting started. Because Lou sure as hell wasn’t interested in peace. Not if it meant a crimp in his money supply.
The police would look the other way because Dan was on Lou’s payroll, and that’s when the shitshow would really begin. The public outcry would be furious. The city knew the police were corrupt, but they tolerated it – partly because they had no choice, but mostly because they’d had three years of peace while I was president. I didn’t see folks going back to the bad old days without raising a ruckus. You can keep people down when you’ve had your boot on their necks for decades – but if you take that boot off, then try to put it back on three years later? Not so easy.
But the most important piece was this was an election year. The mayor and the city council would be shitting themselves over any shootings, and they certainly wouldn’t want to jeopardize their reelections over a corrupt police department. Not in this day and age, when a cell phone video could go viral and get picked up by the national news.
Now, they couldn’t really do anything about Lou – not without risking their lives, and there’s no way in hell that would happen – but they could put on a dog and pony show to prove they were ‘all about law and order.’ If that happened, Dan would be out of a job within a week, and all to save a bunch of politicians’ hides.
That was my leverage point.
That was where I’d start.
16
The next morning, I went to the Richards police department and called on Dan Peters.
The first indication that things had changed was the fucker kept me waiting half an hour. Five days earlier, he would have come to the lobby personally as soon as I set foot in the door.
No longer. I wasn’t the president of the Midnight Riders anymore, and that thirty-minute wait was Dan Peter’s petty little way of letting me know the pecking order had changed.
Of course, he was too much of a pussy to say anything to my face. When the duty officer finally escorted me back, Dan was all smiles and bullshit.
“Jack!” he said, greeting me from his desk. Didn’t get up. “How’s it going?”
Considering that the bastard had taken an indirect hand in Lou’s coup against me, I wanted to punch his face until it looked like raw hamburger. But I restrained myself.
“Not bad, considering,” I said as I took a seat across from him.
“Heard you had a club election the other night. Sure am sorry to hear about the… well, changing of the guard, I guess you could say,” Dan said, with a perfectly faked expression of concern.
It was all a calculated message: I know you ain’t the top dog no more, son, so don’t act like you are.
My knuckles were white, I was clenching my fists so hard.
You have your men kidnap my best friend and my woman, deliver them to my enemy as leverage against me, then sit there and say ‘I heard you had a club election’?
